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What was Glass-Steagall?

The Glass-Steagall Act, the official name of which was “The Banking Act of 1933,” forced banks to separate Commercial Banking from Investment Banking. The intent was to “limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. The [law banned] commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage).”

Glass-Steagall was also responsible for adding deposit insurance, creating the FDIC: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In 1934, deposits of up to $2,500 would be guaranteed by the Federal Government, should the bank that was holding deposits fail. These limits were raised over time, and now you are now insured by the FDIC for up to $250,000 invested in a single bank.

Even before Glass-Steagall was officially repealed, its rules enforcing the separation of insurance companies, commercial banks and investment banks began to crumble.

Merger: Citigroup, The Largest Corporate Combo Ever

In 1998, Travelers Insurance and Citicorp merged to form the behemoth Citigroup, with $700 billion in assets. The merging of an insurance company and a bank violated the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act. So why was it allowed to proceed?

Sanford Weill, the Travelers chairman, said he expected the Fed to quickly approve his company’s application to become a bank holding company and added: “I don’t think we have to spin anything off to make this happen.”

Current law, he said, allows at least two and as many as five years for prohibited assets to be divested. “We are hopeful that over that time the legislation will change,” he added.

Deregulation: “The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999” (The Death of Glass-Steagall)

Glass-Steagall was repealed by the “Financial Services Modernization Act” in 1999, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This Act allowed commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to consolidate. And consolidate they did.

It clarified the law so that most over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions between “sophisticated parties” would not be regulated as “futures” under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 (CEA) or as “securities” under the federal securities laws. Instead, the major dealers of those products (banks and securities firms) would continue to have their dealings in OTC derivatives supervised by their federal regulators under general “safety and soundness” standards. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000)

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission requested that there be “functional regulation” of this Over-the-Counter derivatives market. Their request was denied by lawmakers.

After this Act, “neither the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) nor the Federal Reserve, nor any state insurance regulators had the ability to supervise or regulate the writing of credit default swaps by hedge funds, investment banks or insurance companies.” (Barry Ritholtz, Bailout Nation p. 131)

Even More Deregulation: Five Investment Banks are allowed Unlimited Leverage… by the SEC

In April 2004, five members of the SEC met to discuss a change that was being asked for by the five largest investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers). The requested change was to allow them to take on far more debt than was originally allowed under the net capital rule. Hank Paulson, who at the time was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, “led the charge.” The SEC’s members unanimously voted to grant this except to the five largest investment banks.

The old net capital rule had “limited investment bank leverage (defined as the ratio of debt to equity) to 12 to 1.” However, under this new exception, the big investment banks quickly increased their leverage by borrowing more money, leveraging up to 20-1, 30-1 and even as high as 40-1 leverage. This means that they had 40 times more (borrowed) money invested in various financial products than they actually had as equity (easy to sell assets).

These deregulatory forces paved the way for the global financial meltdown of 2008.